This collection comprises fourteen refreshingly short (11-18 page) chapters (preceded by an introduction) based on papers delivered at a conference on ‘Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges,’ held in Washington D.C. in February 2003. Kären Wigen, in her introduction, rightly emphasizes that oceans have received little attention in conventional historiography except as links between continents, and as arenas of conflict for territorial powers. She also underscores the need to recognize the unique characteristics of each ocean. However, contrary to its claim to examine all the major oceans, this volume concentrates overwhelmingly on the Atlantic in the period 1500-1900, when Wigen argues that “an increasing density and scale of interregional interaction led to the forging of a single world system” (p. 14). Because of this, the volume also reflects largely Eurocentric concerns.
The two major exceptions are the contributions by Giancarlo Casale and Peter Shapinsky. Casale reveals the existence of a significant corpus of primary works by sixteenth-century scholars working in the Ottoman Empire on trade and travel in the Indian Ocean world, such as Feridun Beg, Kutbeddin Mekki (al-Nahrawali), Seyfi Çelebi, and Seydi Ali Reis, very little of which has yet been translated into English. Shapinsky probes the fascinating realm of Japanese maritime groups, such as the Noshima Murakami, who took advantage of political instability between the mid fifteenth and late sixteenth centuries to transform themselves from outlaws (kaizoku) to respectable sea-lords controlling, through tolls and passes, traffic on both inland waterways and external sea lanes. Two other contributions, by Kerry Ward on the Cape of Good Hope as an oceanic crossroads in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, and Hans Van Tilburg on the brief history of Chinese junks along the Californian coast in the second half of the nineteenth century appear to have been chosen to beef up the non-Atlantic input and sit somewhat uneasily in this collection.
Most of the remaining chapters focus on the European-dominated Atlantic. They are nevertheless valuable contributions, notably as part of a collection. John Gillis points out that until the late-eighteenth century, the Atlantic comprised for mercantilist European nation states a series of island posts to facilitate maritime access to resources, rather than providing a sea lane to conquer and maintain overseas territorial domains. The opposite concept is explored for the Indonesian Archipelago by Jennifer Gaynor in her study of first the colonial Dutch and subsequently the nationalist Indonesian manipulation of the concept of archipelago to promote the idea of a territorial entity upon an essentially maritime space.
The contrast in the Atlantic world between continent and sea is further elaborated by Carla Phillips and Eliga Gould. Whereas continental enclaves of European settlement first in South America and then in North America, reproduced the political, religious and judicial structures of Europe which provided the basis for an initial acceptance, and then rejection of European sovereignty, the Atlantic maritime space was hotly contested. Gould points out that the “law of nations” held to be universally applicable on continents was only applied to oceans during the eighteenth century. As a result, the Atlantic was from 1500-1700 an “autonomous sphere” (p. 108) where European countries could wage war on one another even if treaty-bound to peace in Europe.
By the same token, as Allan Karras emphasises, such “autonomous” maritime spheres offered port dwellers and mariners operating within that space the opportunity to profit from activities judged illegal in Europe, such as smuggling and piracy. For much of the period between 1500 and 1715, the distinction drawn between “pirate” as illegal, and “corsair” as legal representative of a territorial authority, which had previously been established in the Mediterranean (chapter by Emily Tai), broke down. However, in the early eighteenth century, European states increasingly extended territorial jurisdiction over maritime spaces, and in a bitter campaign from 1715-26, in which as Marcus Rediker illustrates, neither side gave any quarter, largely suppressed Atlantic piracy.
The rise of the international economy in the nineteenth century eroded mercantilism and created unparalleled maritime commerce, fuelled by the development of steam-powered transport and the cutting of the Suez and Panama canals. It also created huge demand for labour in which, however, Whites invariably enjoyed better conditions of work and pay than non-Whites. This forms the context for studies by Alan Cobley and Risa Fausette on Caribbean, and G. Balachandran on South Asian, seamen. And while one might query Cobley’s claim that Afro-Caribbean seafarers were the “principal pioneers of modern industrial wage labor” and the “main pioneers of a multiethnic, international working-class consciousness” (p. 154), the evidence is overwhelming that white workers, in order to maintain superior conditions of work and pay, reinforced their employers’ racial division of the work force.
In sum, this volume forms a worthwhile contribution to the historiography on oceanic history, although its dominant focus is conventional: the Atlantic from 1500 to 1900. Pre-1500 Atlantic networks, such as those forged by the Norsemen and Celts, are ignored, as is the increasing evidence that the first global economy did not emerge from Europe and the European “Voyages of Discovery” but in the Indian Ocean world at least half a millennium earlier.